Weapon

A weapon is used by the player to attack opponents. It is displayed onscreen as part of the body of the player character to simulate a first person perspective. In Doom, it is the main aspect of the game action.

Each appears in the form of an item that, when picked up, provides the player with an additional weapon with which to attack opponents, as well as some ammo for the corresponding weapon. Normally, weapons are either placed in levels by the designers or dropped by dying opponents (such as zombies in the Doom games). Once a weapon is picked up during a game, any additional weapons of the same type will count only as ammunition.

Each weapon has advantages and disadvantages when used against a given monster. Broadly speaking, however, the larger weapons do more damage but are harder to find and harder to keep stocked with ammunition. In each game, one or two weak weapons require no ammo and are therefore always available.

Early alpha releases of Doom armed the player with a semi-automatic rifle, optionally equipped with a double-bladed bayonet as a melee weapon.[1] This weapon was not included in the finished game. The rifle sprites revealed the player character to be wearing elbow pads, which can still be seen on the player character sprite. A few other weapons were also included in the alpha versions.

Shotgun: A good general-purpose weapon capable of dealing medium-high damage, especially at close range. Reload time is slightly longer than normal.

Chaingun: Very good against large crowds of small monsters or single large monsters, but its rapid rate of fire can quickly deplete its ammo supply.

Rocket launcher: Fires explosive rockets. Does a lot of damage, but can also seriously hurt the player if used indiscriminately at close range.

Plasma gun: Shoots pulses of blue-hot plasma at high speed, which can take down groups of incoming enemies easily — if aimed properly.

BFG9000: The "Big Fucking Gun." Somewhat counter-intuitive to operate at first, but kills almost any monster in one shot.

The chaingun and pistol both use the same ammo type (bullets), so using either will also affect the other in ammo. The shotgun and super shotgun (see below) also share their ammo pool (shells) as do the plasma gun and BFG9000, which both use cells.

Unmaker: A demonic laser gun which rapidly fires paralyzing red slugs but can be upgraded in firepower by the collection of Demon Keys. The red slugs stun monsters, temporarily rendering them unable to attack for about 2-3 seconds. Monsters are still able to move, however.

Other games

Heretic's weapons are more or less equivalents of Doom's weapons, except for the Firemace. Also, each weapon that uses ammunition has its own kind rather than sharing ammo like some Doom weapons. The Doom equivalent of each Heretic weapon is listed in parentheses below: